All The Little Things
by siobhane
Summary: AU. Squall reflects on what really matters when he meets a stranger at his mother's bar. Maybe, Laguna got a few things right after all.
(Please note, this is not my work. It was written by my boyfriend Ryan (I beta read), whom I convinced to let me publish it because he does not have a fanfic account. Maybe I'm biased, but I really like this. Published with permission.)

Ryan's Notes:

I've never written a fan fiction before. Please be gentle. I'm fragile and squishy on the inside.

 **All The Little Things**

~for Siobhane, with love.

-1-

They say space is infinite.

That we are just a tiny speck of dust in a void that knows no end. That anything and everything we do is insignificant. We will have no impact on the universe at large, no matter how hard we try.

Some nights, it's easy to believe this is true.

My father says it's the little things that count. No matter how small and insignificant they seem, the little things are what you remember in the end. He says I will remember the way the light looked in a particular moment, and the way the air smelled, and the song that played on the radio and all of it will matter to me some day.

My father is a moron.

Don't get me wrong, I have respect for my elders and all that. He's my father, but he is also an overly-sentimental, sappy idiot, and sometimes, he's full of shit.

There will never be anything significant about the way the florescent light in the kitchen illuminates the sink while I wash the thousandth beer glass of the night. Nothing meaningful in the burn scars on my wrists from the stove in the back. Or the smell of the garbage after a busy weekend. Or that same damn song Laguna plays at closing time, every single night.

It's all meaningless.

I know he doesn't mean it literally, but my life is a series of little things that string together into mind-numbing monotony so endless, I can actually relate to his chronic wanderlust in a way that I relate to nothing else about him.

Yet, I enjoy the monotony of small town life more than I crave the lights of distant cities and far away lands. All Laguna's stories hold a certain charm, but they don't move me to pack a bag and go find myself. I already know who I am and where I belong.

Every day in Winhill is the same as the last. The same people sit at the bar and tell the same stories every night and they all laugh at the same three stale jokes my father tells over and over again.

I know them by heart.

 _I'm reading a book on the history of glue. I just can't seem to put it down._

 _What lies on the bottom of the ocean and twitches? A nervous wreck._

 _Did you hear about the restaurant on the moon? Great food. No atmosphere._

Maybe someday, I'll be the guy at the bar every night, drinking my cares away. Except I won't share my stories. Maybe, I won't have any to tell.

Laguna says that nothing I do in this life will be remembered unless I make my mark upon the world. Even if I did, I doubt anyone would care. Truth be told, I'm not interested in leaving a mark. I don't want my name writ in blood upon the history books for generations to come.

I don't even want to be a footnote.

-2-

She's dressed in white, like everyone else in the bar. There are flowers and ribbons woven through her dark hair and a mischievous gleam in her eye. I can see right away she's underage and up to no good. That's not so unusual, even for Winhill, but she is unaccompanied, and that **is** unusual.

"Table three?" my mother asks.

"Chocobo fritters, three Winhill Ale on tap and a basket of fries," I tell her. "Elle's got it."

My mother's hand brushes over my arm and her smile is gentle and warm.

"You don't have to be here, if you have some place else you want to go tonight," she says. "Go, be a teenager for a change."

"And miss all the fun?" I ask. "Laguna hasn't started telling jokes yet."

"And thank Hyne for that," she says. "Do me a favor. Keep him **out** of my kitchen."

"What now?"

"Tartar sauce," she says. "He put chili powder in my tartar sauce because he says it's prettier that way."

I laugh because though my father means well, I'm sure some day his good intentions will burn the place to the ground. Or, maybe my mother will get fed up with his idiocy and stab him through the eye with a paring knife.

One or the other is bound to happen eventually.

"Can you handle the front for a few minutes?" she asks.

"Sure."

The underage girl has made her way to the bar and she smiles flirtatiously as she waves some Gil at me. I'm no fool. She will aggressively try to convince me to give her alcohol, just like every other girl her age who wanders into the bar unchaperoned. And I will have to be the hard-ass that tells her no.

"Yeah?"

"Winhill Ale?" she says. "In a glass."

"Got ID?"

"I left it at my Aunt's. I'm eighteen, I promise."

She looks like she's fifteen, if that, and I know she's lying. I smell alcohol on her as she leans toward me across the bar. Someone has already indulged her.

She's pretty. Big brown eyes, the color like melted chocolate, framed by long dark lashes. A smile that would make most guys melt.

"Sorry," I say. "Can't serve you without ID."

"Please?"

"Not without ID."

She pouts as I collect the empty bottles and glasses from the bar top. I ignore her imploring stare as I pour fresh whiskey for Harold and Bill, two regulars that basically live at the end of the bar.

Harold is telling a tall tale about the time a Ruby Dragon attacked Winhill and he single-handedly brought it down with a saber and his wits. No one has the heart to tell him the dragon was really a stray Moomba with a bum leg. Or that he passed out face-down in the mud when the Moomba licked his hand.

When I return, she's still there.

"Why are you the only one not dressed up?" she asks.

That should be pretty obvious. It's not easy to get beer and the occasional bloodstain out of white festival garb.

"Working."

"Well, then, what do you do for fun around here?" she asks. "I've been in town two days and you're the first person I've seen my own age."

"Work," I repeat.

There are about five local people our age, so it isn't a surprise I'm the first she's encountered, but I'm the last person who could show her a good time.

"How old are you?"

I don't know why she cares. She's a visitor and she'll go back to wherever she came from eventually.

"...Seventeen."

"So, you can serve the alcohol if you're underage, but you can't drink it?"

I don't tell her my father usually slips me a beer at some point during a busy night, and that I'll drink it out back so my mother doesn't see. I don't tell her I've worked here my whole life or that she's not the first girl to ask too many questions in hopes of charming me into serving her.

"Are you going to order something?"

"What do you recommend?"

"Ginger ale."

It's such a cliché to use the phrase, _she smiles with her eyes_ , but that's what she does. Her eyes turn up at the corners and it's cute. A little too cute. The kind of girl that could break my heart if I let her.

Ellone returns to the bar with a tray laden with empty glasses and rattles off a series of drink orders that I fill by rote. She goes up on her toes and to kiss to my cheek because she knows it will embarrass me. I wipe off her lipstick and scowl when my hand comes away sticky and pink.

"Drinks up, Elle," I say. "Knock it off."

"You're blushing," she says.

"Go away."

Ellone just laughs at me and ferries the drinks out to the floor. I take a few more orders at the bar before the dark-haired outsider waves me over.

"About that ginger ale..."

-3-

Laguna says you shouldn't look at the stars for too long or else you'll get lost in them and all your hope turns to despair when faced with the vast and mind-bending idea that everything above you is infinite. There are planets and solar systems, black holes and dying stars and things without names, things that defy conventional science and logic and what we think we know about life.

I wonder if he isn't right. I can't help but look, but I never feel more insignificant than I do under a clear night sky.

Then again, there is a distinct possibility that he was staring at the stars one of the ten times he fell off a cliff.

There is no moon tonight, and the revelry in town is far away as I sit on the small dock on the edge of the lake with an assortment of beers I filched from the fridge. From where I sit, I can hear the band playing old dance standards but the commotion hasn't reached this far yet.

I expect my solitude to be interrupted. I'm not surprised when footsteps resonate in the wood beneath me and I don't turn around to see who has come to intrude upon my solitude. Maybe they will go away when they see it's me. Everyone knows that Squall Leonhart-Loire is the worst at small talk. And real conversation? You might as well forget it.

"Do you have ID, son?"

I take a swallow of my beer and turn my head just enough to see the girl from the bar a few feet away. The light at the end of the dock casts her in silhouette, but I know who she is.

"You going to arrest me?"

"Depends."

"On what?"

"If one of those is for me or not."

-4-

Her name is Rinoa and she is from Deling City. Her father is a General, her mother a famous jazz pianist. My mother plays her music when the bar is closed and my father can't stand it. He says it makes him sad. He's never told me why.

I'm intrigued by this girl from Deling City, who doesn't take the hint that I want to be left alone. She's not put-off by my one-word answers to her questions. I suspect she's lonely, but who isn't? You come into the world alone and you die alone and it's only the pieces in the middle that differentiate your experience from anyone else's.

She drinks all my beer and she talks and I sit there and listen.

For the first time in months, maybe years, I'm not bored.

-5-

"Do you believe in the possibility that there might be a parallel universe, where we're ourselves but we live totally different lives?" she asks. "Like, you're you, but you are not you?"

I take her beer away from her and set it on the dock.

"You've had enough."

"I'm totally serious," she says. "Like, how would we be different? Maybe, I become an orphan and I'm raised by serial killers. And you grow up in Trabia with the Shumi tribe and become an apprentice Moomba or something."

I'm drunk enough to laugh at the absurdity of this suggestion. I can't help it. Her enthusiasm is endearing, albeit ridiculous, and the idea of myself living some other life is beyond the scope of my imagination. I am not suited to much besides bartending and extreme introspection, and only one of those is a paying job. I know plants because of my mother's flower shop, but I have a certified black thumb - one of about three things I inherited from Laguna.

"Or, maybe I'm a Sorceress and you become my Knight," I say.

"Inverted trope! Yes!" she cries. "Tell me more!"

"...whatever," I say. "I'm being facetious."

"Well, that's a shame because I bet that would be a really good story."

I don't tell her I have no stories. I'm not my father, who has lived a life outside this small town and has seen and done things I only know about through his convoluted tales of the world. The world is a place I don't know if I want to see.

"What do you want to do when you grow up, Squall?" she asks.

"I'm already doing it."

"You want to be a bartender?"

"Why not?"

"I don't know. You just seem like there's more to you than that."

"...whatever."

If I had any imagination at all, I'd write. If I had any desire to _expand my horizontals_ , as my father would say, I'd travel and write about the world. Maybe not the people, but the places, as he did a long time ago.

Or maybe, I'd just join the army. Then again, I'm not suicidal.

"How is it that the best looking guy in town is so reluctant to talk?" she asks. "You're supposed to be cocky and full of yourself."

I shrug because I don't know what to say. Call me shy or socially defective, it doesn't matter. If my father has taught me anything, it's that words are largely useless.

"Wow," she says. "Okay, let's try something else."

She seizes my hand and stands up. She tries to tug me to my feet as I stare up at her, struck stupid by both the excessive alcohol in my system and the unabashed invasion of my personal space.

"What are you doing?" I ask.

"Up."

I get to my feet reluctantly and kick over an empty beer bottle on the way up. I'm more drunk than I expected, but I lost count an hour ago.

"We're going to dance."

"I don't dance."

"I'll lead, you follow."

"Isn't it supposed to be the other way around?"

-6-

There are fireworks and the sky blooms green and blue and red and gold as Rinoa dances with me on the dock. The colors reflect on the lake and the night around us is brighter than daylight. I can't see the stars anymore, but I don't mind.

I lied when I said I couldn't dance. My mother taught me years ago, but all I can remember is how to waltz. I am awkward and uncoordinated and my feet don't move the way I want them to. She laughs and guides me in a slow, clumsy circle, and the fireworks reflect in her dark, laughing eyes. I'm too drunk to care how stupid this is, or how this is a thing I would never do if I was sober.

She rests her head against my shoulder, and it's nice. The flowers in her hair smell like gardenias. Her hair is soft against my cheek. I've never been this close to someone who wasn't related to me.

We dance long after the fireworks end and the music from town has stopped. I wouldn't even call it dancing. We just sway in circles under the moonless sky.

I don't mind that, either.

For the first time, I see a different future for myself. One where I was not the strange old bachelor who never spoke, but a man who saw the world for what it was and told his stories on paper. A man who collected the little moments like Triple Triad cards and turned them into something bigger.

Into something significant.

-7-

It's almost dawn when I walk her to her Aunt's house down the road. She's leaving in three days but all it took to leave her mark on me was a dance and few bottles of pilfered beer.

Maybe, the marks you leave on the world are not on the world itself, but on the people around you. History might not remember me, but maybe she will.

Maybe, I'll be important enough to remember in ten years, or twenty. Maybe she'll think of this night and the awkward boy she danced with on the docks in a boring little town when she was seventeen. Maybe, she'll smile because it was such an insignificant thing to remember after so long.

And just maybe, I'll think about it too.


End file.
